Owlin in the news

Owlin Founder and Managing Director Sjoerd Leemhuis took part in a wide-ranging interview with Sprout and an insightful conversation with BNR Nieuwsradio that delved into Owlin’s past, present, and future.

Owlin in the news

Owlin Founder and Managing Director Sjoerd Leemhuis took part in a wide-ranging interview with Sprout and an insightful conversation with BNR Nieuwsradio that delved into Owlin’s past, present, and future. The two discussions came hand in hand with the formalization of the company’s partnership with Fitch Solutions. The new collaboration is likely to provide tangible benefits to Owlin’s expanding operations and simultaneously advance the services provided by Fitch Solutions. Perhaps partly because of our collaboration the renowned rating institution won an American Financial Technology Award for ‘Best Use of the Agile Method.’

Close

Newsletter | January 2019

Product Updates

Product Updates

Owlin has jump-started 2019 in style by allowing you to assess the state of your portfolio even faster.

Simply hovering over bubbles now brings up a popup with a summary of the latest information around that entity. The summary also clarifies some of the metrics that determine the bubble size. You can see for instance the recent news flow of an entity, its ranking in relation to the earlier timeframes, and the keywords of both selected and unselected themes.

The change in ranking compared to previous timeframes is also reflected in the in-depth view. Up, Down, or Neutral arrow symbols give you a quick indicator of the direction of the trends.

The user experience of the Owlin dashboard has also been improved for lower resolution screens. The in-depth view for instance, now allows users to hide the bar chart to see more news headlines. The toggle for this can be found in the top-right corner of the bar chart.

For the first half of 2019 we have some more interesting features planned:

• Push notifications in the form of desktop notifications, emails and mobile alerts;

• A facebook/twitter inspired timeline for viewing and controlling the flow of alerts;

• Visualisation of relationships between entities or topics for large enough datasets;

• Ad hoc search for entities that are not in your dashboard (yet) and if you want track it as a normal entity you can ask us to include it right from the dashboard.

Personalisation will be an overarching theme for many of these new features:

“We essentially want to make the dashboard more of a home for the user”

says Full Stack Developer Wessel Stoker.

“Currently, the dashboard is the same for everyone. We want to make it personal through user preferences and provide advice [to our clients] on possibilities. We’re doing a lot of things in the navigation options right now, but we will as always keep improving going forward.”

Close

Newsletter | January 2019

Interesting Scoop

Interesting Scoop

Fake It to Make It? What Deepfakes Mean for the Future of (Mis)Information

Fake news has been a prominent theme of information circulation throughout the world’s modern history. For every well-substantiated story, there has always seemed to be a rumor-filled news piece floating around. And while the problem is not unique to the internet era in which we live, political events have caused the phenomenon to perceptually become more prominent recently. This misinformation problem has swelled up to the point that many have proclaimed that we now live in a post-truth world where facts are becoming secondary. Oxford Dictionaries even named post-truth its Word of the Year in 2016. Thankfully though, numerous novel fact-checking efforts have sprung up in recent times to attempt to remedy the problem, with varying success rates. Moving forward, the competition between these good news guys and their bad news counterparts, if you will, will be perhaps most exemplified by deepfakes, a technology that has the potential to change how information is perceived in 2019 and beyond.

Misinformation up to this point has been chiefly concerned with bending facts through changing the textual language in which they have been presented. What makes a deepfake theoretically more dangerous is that it is solely concerned with the modification of videos. This means that videos of influential personalities can now be altered to have the people in question say things that they have not — to potentially devastating effects.

Such process is not done through easy-to-spot video modification tools that societies often scoff at before discarding out of their collective brains. It is instead done via highly advanced artificial-intelligence, deep-learning technologies that can bewilder even the most diligent fact checkers out there. Deepfake technology cannot simply be nullified with a simple Google search. Its prevalence will in fact make reaching factual information only more difficult in the future. But this is not to say that it is all doom and gloom from here on out. As a matter of fact, the truth is still powerful enough to set us free so to speak. Global efforts are fortunately already striving to defeat the pernicious technology before it gains a firm societal foothold.

We at Owlin feel that the first step that needs to be taken in this journey is to publicly identify the problem and subsequently spread awareness on the challenges that it presents. We believe that nullifying the impact of deepfakes and fake news will only be possible through spreading knowledge on the presence of these misleading tactics in societies around the world. Verifiable information sharing is the best counter to misinformation after all.

While deepfake technology is assuredly advanced, there are some measures out there — a speaker’s eye and lip movements are typically revealing — for training journalists and the public alike to spot inconsistencies in any given video. Collaborations among the mediums through which these hazardous videos might be shared on are similarly likely to present concrete solutions to what now seems like an inevitable verifiability issue for global societies.

The challenge ahead will be to informatively convince people to continue chasing a tougher-to-reach reality rather than elect to make what is fake the only societal factuality out there.

Close

Newsletter | January 2019

Companies we admire

Companies we admire

How much of the internet is fake? That is a question that many are asking themselves these days as 2018 gives way to 2019. It all arises from the fact that the internet does not seem like it once was. Everything feels somewhat less real, and the line between human activity and automation is as blurrier than ever.

Bots are a prime example of this problem, with their online activity continuously trending upwards vis-à-vis that of humans. It has gotten to a point where humans are estimated to merely comprise a shade over 60 percent of total web activity. This not only means that identifying the difference among the two groups is a test that most are likely to have failed at one point or another, but also that bot activity can be utilized to mimic that of humans to serve nefarious interests without being easily spotted. Naturally, this poses a problem for the digital world.

Many companies have stepped up to this challenge in recent times. Among the more successful enterprises putting up the good fight here is Distil Networks, a US-based cyber security firm specializing in detecting and combatting sinister bot activity. Founded in 2011, the company’s services illustrate the distance that cyber security has travelled since the days of now relatively simple DDoS attacks.

Indeed, Distil offers bot detection and protection nearly everywhere on the web: in hybrid environments, on-premise, in code, and even on the cloud. Its online protection system uses more than 200 device attributes to ensure that a browser is formatted correctly, has the correct JavaScript engine running, and is functioning the way that it should. The company further lays claim to the world’s largest repository of known web violators and shares it with its customers on a 24/7 basis.

These strives to protect the web have allowed Distil to raise around $60 million in investments. Moving forward, the company is likely to remain at the forefront of bot cyber security inventiveness as automation inevitably becomes more widespread and advanced.

While an ocean separates us for now, we at Owlin will be rooting for the company as it continues to innovate from afar, hoping that its efforts will help in preventing the world from descending to a state where the concept of digital security feels more fake than real.

Close

Newsletter | January 2019

Events

Events

December 5 and 6, 2018: The Owlin team took part in FinTech Connect 2018 on December 5 and 6 in London. The two-day conference brought together some of the financial sector’s biggest names to recap 2018’s most significant developments and look forward to what 2019 has in store for the industry. Commercial Director of Owlin Bob Koster gave a presentation on the company’s expansive real-time services to a selection of the 6.000 attendees.

Product Updates

Product Updates

With great pleasure we announce that Owlin will be integrating its tenth language this month: Our dashboard will now be supporting Danish! This means that your business can now rely on actionable real-time insights from one of Northern Europe’s biggest markets. Incorporating local sources from Denmark caps off a tremendous year for Owlin — and that’s not all!!

A few weeks ago we also added the functionally to export entity names from your portfolios. This functionality has been extended and now supports exporting the scores behind the absolute and relative newsflow functionality. You simply select some of your portfolios, a set of news themes and the system will produce a csv file with the appropriate scores. You can mix and match all of your news themes such as risk categories or your organization's custom topics. This enables you to easily integrate our news analytics and scoring in your spreadsheets, models or presentation deck.

Analyzing Data, Managing Accounts, Owlin Ahead

Analyzing Data, Managing Accounts, Owlin Ahead

An interview with Berjan Waanders, Account Manager at Owlin

At Owlin we take great pride in having team members that go above and beyond to better understand and develop our products. This often leads not only to a seamless integration between Owlin’s different departments, but also to team members picking up key skills and honing their individual passions in our business along the way. Account Manager Berjan Waanders is a great example of this distinct company culture.

Joining Owlin as a part-time data analyst in August 2017, Berjan was at first primarily concerned with gaining relevant experience on the side while he pursued a master’s in supply chain management. He quickly found himself becoming more and more submersed into our product and culture. Reading thoroughly on topics and applying complex data filters quickly became a passion, all while his business acumen continued to swell up on the side.

A year after joining the company, he became a full-time member of Owlin and transitioned to account management, an area that he feels allows him to do “a bit of everything”.

Within the new position, Berjan is adamant that his content-based data analysis role has given him a unique viewpoint on both the company’s inner workings and the overall product. Now he feels confident that he has the full tech picture in mind when addressing client requests. This comprehensive understanding has particularly given him a well-rounded vision of the Company’s overall direction. It has also allowed him to enjoy the little moments that make the Owlin experience a one-of-a-kind spectacle even more.

“After a year as a data analyst, I knew the company and the people quite well” he says.

“What being an account manager has allowed me to see, is how involved everyone [the Owlin team] is in developing the future of the company”

Looking ahead, Berjan remains as intrigued by Owlin’s possibilities as he was when he first started. He is quick to point out that he is specifically excited about the various clients that are joining the company’s portfolio over the upcoming period as well as the product developments that are likely to come with them. When quizzed on what he thinks his favorite aspect of working in the company however, there is only one answer in his mind:

“My favorite thing about working in Owlin is that team members amaze me every day by what they do or how they act. It makes coming here every day worth it and a great challenge.”

Interesting Scoop

Insourcing the Open Source: Why IBM Shelled Out $34 Billion for Red Hat

Cloud computing and open source software (OSS) have become important pillars of the IT industry. The biggest software companies in the world have all invested vast resources in recent times to obtain large slices of these interrelated pies that continue to be baked at a gradual yet steady pace. Many view the move to OSS as critical to long-term survival — adapt to market needs or risk dying a slow death as new players take their place in the digital game of thrones.

IBM recently signaled its intent to fight for its seat at the big-boy table with its acquisition of OSS and cloud computing pioneer Red Hat in a deal worth around $34 billion. In doing so, IBM is attempting to break out of a troubling funk where it has seen its shares lose about a third of their value over the last five years. Red Hat on the other hand has had a markedly different outlook in that same five-year timeframe: With an early entry into the OSS and cloud markets through its innovative Linux-based solutions, the value of its shares has jumped 170 percent. IBM will surely be hoping to incorporate these good fortunes into its plans to bump shoulders with digital behemoths such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in a cloud ecosystem that still carries large growth margins.

Indeed, in the company statement outlining the details of its Red Hat acquisition, IBM pointed out that it is attempting to capitalize on a burgeoning cloud infrastructure that only 20 percent of businesses have tapped into. And therein lies the rub within the competition among the digital world’s major players: Everyone is now trying to reach the 80 percent of corporations that are still on the sidelines before anyone else does.

As we alluded to in our last Interesting Scoop, there are unique values present to companies in their choice to either move to the cloud or retain on-site servers. Within our global services, it made sense for us at Owlin to move from on-site to Google Cloud last year. While the cloud is not perfect for every company, it does in many ways represent the future of computing.

One of said imperfections is that the cloud industry has yet to solve the hurdles associated with proprietary software. IBM is making a major bet that OSS will solve this and enable it to create more inventive and agile cloud services for its clients. Only time will tell whether this wager pays off or not.

What is important to note here though is that this acquisition is a warning shot: The old greats in IT will fight to remain at the top. That a legacy heavyweight such as IBM is willing to move past its foundational revenue sources and make a staggering investment in OSS is perhaps indicative of the true potential that insourcing the open source has for moving the tech industry forward.

Companies we admire

Companies we admire

“Big problems require big solutions” says The Ocean Cleanup’s website. This might sound like standard corporate jargon, but it really is hard to overstate the significance and difficulty of this young nonprofit’s mission to clean up the ocean from plastic. More impressive perhaps is that the company has put its words into action and currently aims to clear over 50 percent of the ocean’s estimated five billion plastic pieces within the next five years.

Although this could sound overly ambitious, everything about The Ocean Cleanup’s journey up to this point shows that the company is capable of fulfilling its lofty ambitions.

Founded by Dutch entrepreneur and inventor Boyan Slat at the tender age of 18 in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup has grown exponentially over the past few years and now boasts more than 80 employees across its Rotterdam headquarters and around the world. Key to the company’s overall strategy is a simple system that revolves around building pathways to remove plastic from waters without affecting marine life. Such system has allowed The Ocean Cleanup to generate over $30 million in donor revenue from investors around the world.

Click here to find out more about The Ocean Cleanup’s mission and efforts.

Close

Newsletter | November 2018

Events

Events

December 5 & 6 - FinTech Connect 2018: Owlin will be joining many of its industry-leading clients on December 5 and 6 in one of FinTech's largest conventions: FinTech Connect 2018 in London. Catch a demo of our technology at 16:00 on December 5 or swing by our dedicated exhibition stand (P37) during the two-day event to meet our team and learn more about our unique services.

November 8 - Amplitude product leadership lunch: The Owlin team attended a product leadership lunch at the Dylan Hotel in Amsterdam. The event was organized by Amplitude and featured earnest discussions on the current challenges encountered by fast-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses both locally and internationally.

October 23 - Dutch Finance Club NY: The Owlin team was invited to an inspiring roundtable discussion at the Dutch Finance Club NY. The session was organized by the Dutch Finance Club and was held at Société Générale in New York. In the event, the Owlin delegation discussed the company’s cutting-edge AI-driven risk-management solutions as well as ongoing plans to set up Owlin’s operations in the United States.

Close

Newsletter | October 2018

Our client Adyen

Our client Adyen

One of our truly committed and experienced users is Adyen, a top-tier company in online payments all around the globe. Due to an ever growing client portfolio it is increasingly important for Adyen to use the right risk monitoring tools to stay on top of the news.

Pierre Klopper, Credit Risk Analyst in the Amsterdam office has been using Owlin for several years now, and simply can’t do without. Below some quotes that Pierre has shared with us

“Owlin provides us with a news feed of relevant articles in real time - ensuring that we are always up to speed with the latest developments that could affect our merchants and partners. At Adyen we are often informed of events relevant to our clients by Owlin. Having access to this information in a timely manner makes it possible for us to act on short notice in the best interest of both Adyen and our clients”.

When asking Pierre which other companies could benefit from Owlin, Pierre replies:

“Any company that wants to compete in the information economy and has to rely on having reliable information relevant to their specific needs in real time. Using Owlin has been a resounding success to the extent that we have now also started applying the monitoring solution to other departments internally - leveraging the Owlin dashboard for monitoring of our key partners”.

Thanks to Pierre for these kind words! If you have challenges similar to Pierre’s, contact us via Owlin to start solving them together.

Product Updates

Product Updates

Metadata search
The Owlin Dashboard search functionality now supports the lookup of entities using metadata we've added for you. Think of abbreviations, stock-tickers, and subsidiaries. When you search for an entity, the search will not only show the location in the dashboard, but also show you the articles that have been pinned by you or your colleagues about that entity. Moreover, search now also offers quick access to your favorites by ranking them as a top result when you type. Additionally, when you are searching in the pinned articles, you can now use the keyword labels to find pinned articles. Simply type 'fraud' or 'scandal' to see which of the pinned articles have been labelled with these risk words. Next up is extending this keyword search to all articles in your Owlin Dashboard!

Integration of Newsletters
You no longer have to read through all the newsletters in your inbox to check whether there is something relevant in there. From now on you can simply forward the emails to Owlin and we will organize and scan them for relevant (risk) keywords, right alongside the usual news articles. This means your Owlin dashboard is the place where all the stories about your favorite topics and companies come together. Would you like to integrate other sources? Contact us to discover the possibilities.

Interesting Scoop - Fluidity and Security in Corporate Motion

Interesting Scoop

Fluidity and Security in Corporate Motion

As a technology-based company with a distinct focus on news, we at Owlin are well versed in the digital transformations that are shaping all of our lives in ways that could not have been imagined even 10 years ago. It might simply be impossible to understate the ways in which technology has transformed our realities. And yet, we still feel that there are further improvements to be made within all said advancements.

Take for instance the fast transformations currently shaping the world of politics. The political arena is fast becoming a digitized world that is as full of innovation as it is plagued by tough-to-solve vulnerabilities. In that sense, the process of selecting who represents us is indeed representative of where mankind is right now in the process of digital transformation. And we are not just talking about Trump or Salvini using social media for political propaganda here; we are talking about the voting system in its entirety. Our strive for democracy has not changed, but how we cast our votes has.

The BBC recently illustrated such changes wonderfully in a news report stating that the American electoral system might be vulnerable to hacks in the lead up to this year’s US midterm elections here. The report revealed that experts had run a test of American voting hardware and found that the amount of possible flaws within the equipment was “staggering”. Even more disconcerting perhaps, was that the the companies in charge of developing the electoral technology were largely unperturbed by the findings. Instead they are claiming that their systems have features that allow them to be immune to voter manipulation despite the vulnerabilities. Their argument is that the systems used have embedded features that allow the machines to be infallibly audited to reveal any voting discrepancies. Ironically this involves paper printouts that can/need to be evaluated by humans...

At Owlin we are fully aware that the digital ecosystem is so fluid that no technology provider — much less one with products of a political nature — can claim to be unquestionably immune to outside interference, no matter the quality of the cyber security involved. One only needs to gaze at Facebook’s track record of data breaches for proof (see here for a recent example).

It is exactly with that continuous-improvement mindset that Owlin decided to move from on-site servers to Google Cloud in 2017. The rapidly expansive flexibility of cloud-based services has not just provided us at the company with greater recovery options in case of any unexpected crash, but has also facilitated data access across the world within Owlin’s global operations.

This is not to say that moving from in-house to the cloud is definitively better for every company; the situation here is fluid and very much dependent on a company’s size and needs. At this point in time, the flexibility and security of the cloud is crucial for Owlin’s rapid development. If there is anything that the constantly changing digital infrastructure that we are a part of is built on, it is a continued willingness to fluidly move forward in possibilities as well as actions. A technology’s position in the ecosystem might appear to be fail proof, but in a fast-moving digital climate, staying still will never win any race.

Companies we admire

Companies we admire

Fixing computers and other electronics was the seed for a career in technology for many of Owlin’s engineers. iFixit is a company built by and for exactly these kinds of technology enthusiasts. We don’t just admire iFixit for its content but also for its community friendly business model.

It all started in 2003 after one of the founders could not find a repair manual for his broken macbook. Instead of staying annoyed or having to pay a lot of money for the repair, he decided to do something about it. He made a nice repair guide and put it online for free. After making more of these, people started to take notice and it became a full-fledged business.

iFixit relies on the goodwill of the people reading the guides they make by also selling the replacement parts needed. And if you are happy you finally found a good guide on repairing your laptop or phone, you are pretty likely to want to give them something back and just order parts and tools from them.

It is great to see that iFixit managed to grow from a simple enthusiast’s initiative to a profitable business that sold over $21 million worth in 2016 and is reaching more than 90 million do-it-yourselfers! Have a look for yourself: here.

Events

Events

October 19 & 20 - ADE Hackathon: Last week Owlin had the privilege of being an API partner for the ADE Hackathon. Participants from all around the world were hacking on tools for more sustainable festivals, fairer digital rights managements, to improve organisational efficiency and to celebrate the history of 30 years of dance music that turned Amsterdam into the capital of the largest music industry in the world.

October 19 - Owlin Data Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA): To keep up with the latest in machine learning and have some brain stimulating discussions, three of Owlin’s data scientists attended this year’s Deep Learning Poster Sessions. It is an even organized by Amsterdam Data Science where students select and study the most interesting recent papers in the field of deep learning and present them in the form of posters in a public setting.

This edition was accompanied by a fantastic talk on adaptive and explainable artificial intelligence by Trevor Darrell, a distinguished professor from UC Berkeley. The chosen topics are close to our hearts and professor Darrell gave a great overview from the point of view of computer vision.

One of the highlights of the talk was improving deep learning algorithms by making them more curious in a quite literal sense. Another highlight was to make neural networks more explainable by making small networks that can detect simple things and compose them like Lego blocks into more complicated networks. To continue the explainability theme, professor Darrell also discussed methods to visualize which areas of an image a neural network is “paying attention to”.

We were introduced to quite a hilarious example that showed the necessity for explainable AI. In an application for self-driving cars a system that was trained on German roads was confused when applied to roads in the United States. What happened is that the German dataset was recorded using a Mercedes Benz… This little guerilla marketing trick made the system focus on the famed Daimler Benz hood ornament. When applied to US roads, it was “missing” something in the middle of its view. Of course, one can compensate for that, but it does show that deep learning is not magic and that introspectability is of paramount importance.

All in all, it was great day for the Owlin Data Science team to get inspired by like-minded students and professionals!

New things coming your way

New things coming your way

Product Updates

Put in production last month, Dashboard end-users can export their full portfolio into an Excel file. At a later stage, we will include other metadata in the export as well, such as (risk) scores on individual entities, portfolios or any other specific news themes. This will enable you to use Owlin data in your own (risk) models, spreadsheets and Powerpoint charts. You can find this new feature by clicking on your user name in the top-right corner, and selecting 'Export entities'.

All your news(letters) in one place

All your news(letters) in one place

This is why we love client feedback!

Many of our clients are struggling with an information overflow. Part of the problem is that there are many sources of information and equally many places to consume that information from. A typical example is that our clients follow internal or proprietary newsletters via email, aside from the public news that Owlin already makes insightful. Having to follow both your email and Owlin dashboard, can cause you to miss stories and the connections between them.

Today we are happy to announce a solution to that problem. When the new (beta) release of your dashboard lands, you no longer have to monitor stories from multiple places. You will be able to follow them all from your dashboard by simply auto-forwarding emails to our systems. Having all that information in one place can save you a lot of time and will declutter your inbox.

Aside from having everything in one place, this also means that emails will be organised and analysed similar to all the public news articles we are already tracking for you. Whether you are focussing on specific companies, commodities, industries or strategic themes, the dashboard will always detect and visualise based on your newsletters and public news.

We are not only excited about the upcoming feature release itself, but we are equally impressed by our developer Chileshe. Even though she only joined Owlin less than two months ago, she managed to build almost all of the back-end for this release!

Do you want to be one of the first users to experience the benefit of having your newsletters in the Owlin Dashboard? Contact us at support@owlin.com or your primary person of contact.

Close

Newsletter | September 2018

Owlin | September 2018

Interesting Scoop - Deep learning at Home?

Interesting Scoop - Deep Learning at Home?

At Owlin we know what it’s like to deal with vast amounts of data. Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks and Deep Learning are not just the buzzwords you find in almost every tech article nowadays. The algorithms that stem from these fields of research are truly instrumental when it comes to analyzing and extracting insights from Big Data. The applications range from machine translation, text classification and medical diagnostics all the way to stock market predictions.

As we discussed in a previous edition of Interesting Scoop, the calculations required to train neural networks rely heavily on processing power. It is therefore advantageous, if not necessary, to employ specialized processors to deal with the vast quantities of (vector) equations that need to be solved. Developers and researchers alike often rely on services such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to perform these computations in bulk.

Intel, historically on the forefront of traditional processor development, has been working hard to bring these technologies to more portable solutions. In 2016, they acquired the San Mateo based startup Movidius, specialised in low-power processor chips for computer vision (VPU’s). The Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick that has been developed since, brings the power of specialized vector calculation processing to literally any computer that has a USB port. The applications are not restricted to computer vision alone and span the full range of machine learning tasks. Not only does this development ease prototype testing and product deployment, it also addresses some crucial challenges in compliance by, for instance, eliminating the need for privacy sensitive data being sent to servers.

On august 16th, Intel doubled down on its AI ambitions by announcing the acquisition of the Seattle based startup Vertex.AI, whose mission statement is to “bring the power of neural nets to every application, using new technology invented and built in-house, to make applications that weren’t possible, possible.” Their main accomplishment is the development of their custom PlaidML framework, that aims to bring deep learning to every conceivable platform. The Vertex.AI team will be working alongside the Movidius team in the hope that the synergy will lead to accelerated advances in making the most complex forms of AI more portable.

All of these developments vastly expand the real world applications of machine & deep learning technologies and have the potential to bring them all the way to the palm of your hand. It may radically reshape the current technology landscape, in which being smarter, faster and more efficient is becoming ever more important. You can count on Owlin to follow these developments closely and use them to improve our real-time analysis capabilities wherever possible.

Close

Newsletter | September 2018

September 2018

Companies we admire

Companies we admire

At Owlin we often receive the question: How do you get such talented people?

Part of the answer is that we have partnerships with all sorts of organisations.

An example of this is our collaboration with HackYourFuture. HackYourFuture is a coding school set up for refugees. Over the course of seven months talented men and women with a permit (which means they can live and work in the Netherlands) are trained to become successful developers.

Two of Owlin’s current employees are graduates from HackYourFuture’s training program. One of them, Rabih Alqaraweet, has been with Owlin for two years now. We even made a video about his story, you can watch it here.

“Hiring people like Rabih is a win-win situation”, according to Wouter Kleijn, Partnership Manager of HackYourFuture. Wouter: “Not only do young talented developers help companies like Owlin to grow their business, it gives refugees coming to the Netherland a chance to help themselves and their families.”

Over 80 students have already graduated from the program in the Netherlands, which has now expanded to Belgium, Sweden and Denmark as well. The selection is rigorous, the program competitive. 150 people apply to a new class, but only 15 are allowed to participate every 2 months. Wouter: “Finishing our course really is an achievement."

September 2018

Events

Events

October 19 & 20 - Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE): Owlin collaborates with the biggest dance festival in the world during the upcoming ADE event. More information about the ADE Hackathon can be found at: https://www.adehack.com

September 25 & 26 - PE Café - Data Analytics, Big Data and the Finance Professional: Sebastiaan and Wouter have given two masterclasses in Amsterdam and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, hosted by PE Café. During their masterclass, they dived deeper into the world of Big Data & AI and engaged in some lively discussions on how Owlin applies these in real life cases.

September 6 - ING Research & Innovation Event: Owlin was invited at an ING Research Innovation event, where we gave insights in how our analytics platform could support macro economists, sector researchers and equity analysts with new research methods by using our technology. This inspiring day was well-attended and the breakout sessions gave a lot of food for thought to build further upon.

Full Steam Ahead

Full Steam Ahead

Owlin hasn't been sitting still during the holidays. With new product updates and a growing team, a lot more is to come!

Product Updates

● The top news stories on the main page of your dashboard are now regularly accompanied by photos of the original article.

● The rolling news ticker has a live feature, showing the latest news within your portfolio.

● Notes about new releases will from now on be visible as a pop-up within your dashboard.

● The v1.2 version of our mobile app has been released and is available in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.

More updates are being developed and tested, and we expect to release more nifty new features in your dashboard and app soon!

New Beginnings

The holidays are over and everybody’s slowly getting back into the swing of things. As we’re preparing for the months ahead, we would like to introduce you to our newest member in the commercial team, Sebastiaan Keller. If he
had to describe the last couple of weeks here it would be ‘tropical water slide’.

By tropical Sebastiaan’s getting at Owlin’s culture where "even though I’m different from the rest of the people at Owlin, I feel really comfortable here. Not only am I allowed to be myself, I have to be. That’s the starting
point here.”

But his waterslide is not without its twists and turns:

“I have learnt a ridiculous amount of new things from my colleagues in the short amount of time I’ve been here. You can say that in two weeks, I can add a whole new encyclopedia to my bookshelf. And because the people
here are so smart, I have to be on top of things all the time, otherwise I’ll miss some information. It goes from left to right, back and forth.”

However, it took some time to get to this point and the road wasn’t always easy.

"If you would’ve asked me a year ago if there was anything I would have changed in my career path I could’ve given you a list. But today I can honestly say that that’s not the case, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

Coming from a big corporation, the differences to Owlin are like day and night, but that’s exactly what Sebastiaan was looking for.

“I am now where I want to be and I’m very happy and proud with the fact that I am here because I worked very hard for it.”

Interesting Scoop - Trouble in Quantum Paradise?

Recurring themes in our interesting scoop stories are algorithms and new forms of computing. At the absolute cutting edge of this landscape is Quantum Computing. It is so cutting edge that every aspect has to be rethought from
scratch. New computers, new restrictions, new algorithms, new programming languages,… basically new everything. That means that a crazy amount of work has to be done, and is being done, to make it work. But why would we do this?
What is so special about Quantum Computing?

The main promise of Quantum Computing is that it will lift the speed of computers to an entirely different level than was previously believed impossible. It is not the raw speed that makes things interesting however, but the new
possibilities that it opens up. Some of the best applications can be found in the science for developing new materials. There is hope for instance that room temperature superconductors (a topic for a future scoop) can be designed
through quantum simulations. Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity without any resistance, which means that you could transport electricity without any energy losses! Normally these superconductors need to be
cooled to extremely low temperatures, but if you could find one that is superconducting at room temperature... that would be worth tens of billions of dollars.

An example that is a bit closer to home are computer designed drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is gigantic, but coming up with new drugs is not at all a well understood process. Quantum Computing offers the hope that if you
understand what causes a disease, you can run a quantum simulation to come up with a chemical that counteracts the cause of that disease. This would have far reaching effects for fighting diseases, both on a societal and
financial level.

Applications in the financial industry are also on the horizon though. JPMorgan and Barclays for instance have partnered
late last year with IBM to explore applications ranging from trading, portfolio optimization to asset pricing. More important, but less interesting from the point of view of making money, is the art of not losing money. One of
the easiest problems that Quantum Computers should be able to tackle is cracking security algorithms. So financials should start planning for a future where security measures need to be “Quantum Safe” to prevent being hacked at
will. Awareness of this has not quite reached GDPR levels yet but is certainly growing.

The above sketched hopes and dreams have caused somewhat of a frenzy of research activity and investments from big companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Alibaba but also from startups such as D-Wave systems and Rigetti.

Despite the current activity and optimism, there are reasons to be cautious. First and foremost it is not entirely clear that Quantum Computing will ever be usefully faster than classical computing. Some even doubt it will be
useful at all. One of the most influential and thoroughly argued recent stories in this direction comes from the
mathematician Gil Kalai.

The basic argument is the following. Quantum computers are so sensitive to small impurities and other disturbances that they spend so much effort correcting errors in their computations that useful calculations become
impossible. While a radical point of view and certainly not universally accepted, there are more experts that share this point of view.

Another kink in the armour comes from a discovery of 18 year old Ewin Tang that
landed 2 weeks ago. He discredited the most practically useful example of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than a classical algorithm. This was not because the quantum algorithm was wrong but he found a classical
algorithm that could perform the task as fast as the quantum one.

Interestingly, the new algorithm is of the type that Netflix uses for suggesting movies that you might like. Similar in spirit, Owlin recently introduced a suggestion service that recommends words for building text classifiers.
Concretely, this means that we can improve news filtering on themes you might be interested in such as M&A, product launches and specific types of risk.

To summarize, Quantum Computing holds a lot of promise and there is a lot of activity in the field at the moment but we might have to wait quite some years before useful real-word applications arrive. The world’s best minds are
at it however, and we are following them closely.

Companies We Admire

Staying in the realm of quantum computing, one of the companies at its forefront, is Rigetti Computing. Founded in 2013 by Chad Rigetti, the startup claims it is “the only full-stack quantum computing company in the world”. This
means they do in-house design and fabrication of quantum chips and tightly integrate those with the software that is built on top.

Their latest endeavour is a 128-qubit computer that should be operational in 2019. If they succeed, it is likely going to be the most powerful quantum computer in the world. Beating the tech giants would be very impressive
indeed, but they are they are not sitting still either...

Rigetti’s 128-qubit chip is already done, so it’s a matter of putting the pieces together. IBM and Google, two other contenders in the race, have recently released 50 and 72 qubit chips respectively and are also planning to
scale those numbers up for next year. So the race is on and it is nice to see a startup among the leaders.

Upcoming Events

August 10 @ Owlin HQ: Owlin hosted the HollandFintech Meetup on August 10th. A recap of the event can be found here.

September 6 @ ING Research and Innovation Event: Owlin will be one of the keynote speakers during the ING Research and Innovation event, aiming to inspire research employees to use alternative data.

Holland FinTech Meetup @Owlin

If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much

If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much

For this month's newsletter, we keep it close to home

Owlin in the stores!

The Owlin mobile app is now officially available in the App Store and Google Play Store!

The Owlin app will help you to stay on top of breaking news events around your portfolio companies — during your commute, during long meetings, whilst travelling or anywhere else. The app is free of additional charge and fully
synced with your personal Owlin Dashboard, ensuring a seamless integration with your workflow.

Where can you find the app? Just click the links below, or look for ‘Owlin’ in the Play or App Stores:

ESG Challenges: Separating the Signal from the Noise

Many of you working in finance may be familiar with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) monitoring. If that does not sound familiar: ESG criteria are responsibility guidelines, not laws or regulations, that financial
institutions use to hold companies accountable. However, there are a few challenges when it comes to measuring these.

Implementation of ESG can be tricky, as the field lacks consistency in standards, criteria, and ways measure the related risk. An additional problem is that for many criteria the company that is being evaluated for ESG risk is
also providing the information for that evaluation. This can lead to a dangerous overestimation of ESG compliance in portfolios. Particularly for financials that pride themselves on ESG related topics in their marketing this
opens up reputational risks.

Besides inaccurate data, there is also a lack of structured data, and efficient data collection. Companies are bombarded with long ESG surveys, that can take up to months to complete. This can lead companies to underreport, or
even question whether they should bother in the first place. Therefore, staying on top of your investments from an ESG perspective is difficult.

At the same time however, investors can also have too much data, making it easy to become lost, and miss single data points that may be of great significance. For example, as Cornerstone points out,
BP did not suffer a dip in ESG ratings after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill due to the vast range of other factors that were accounted for.

While Owlin is of course not the answer to all things ESG, this is where Owlin's analytics can help you: separate the signal from the noise, and focus on what's truly important. Owlin’s dashboards enable some of our clients to
track their investments and evaluate if they meet these criteria. The dashboard is near real-time, collects news even from the most local media and makes it easy to continuously monitor even large portfolios on ESG risks with
minimal effort. Using clustering and trend analysis we can immediately point out which companies need a thorough review. Once you are in deep dive mode, various graphs are there to help you gain the helicopter view you need to
take action. This is just one of the many examples of how our dashboards can be used.

If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much

Ralf joined Owlin a little over three years ago. After regularly running into some of the founders in a bar in Utrecht and enjoying the company and conversation, he agreed to help out as a freelancer. That was back when
maximizing the amount of free time was one of his top priorities.

“I then discovered that Owlin didn’t just have nice IT people, but they also had a pretty strategic attitude to their business.”

This changed his mind and gave him the confidence to truly commit.

“My biggest fear was that they would dream of cathedrals, but not know how and who to sell them to. Fortunately, it turned out they were carefully growing as an organisation, without taking shortcuts or burning money
thoughtlessly.”

He enjoys the diversity of backgrounds at Owlin.

“Besides the 12 different nationalities working at Owlin, there is an even wider range of perspectives on every aspect of life, with developers, creatives, physicists and bankers sitting at the same lunch table. I like
the fact that commercial people are involved in technical trade-offs more than I was used to. Even better is that it also works the other way around: developers are just as involved with the commercial strategy and priorities.
This is very motivating and creates a lot of trust within the team.”

The recent successes of Dutch startups, illustrated by the IPO of Adyen and that of Elastic later this year, he attributes to the Dutch no-nonsense approach.

“It has to do with an honest perspective, where everyone is aiming not just for a quick win, but for a sustained win. Equally important is the realization that we should be tackling the hard problems, do the actual work
and be realistic with expectations we set. That means we continuously validate what we do with real customers. The Dutch don’t want to get lucky, instead they aim for their success to be reliable and inevitable.”

Python, developed in the 1990s by the Dutch Guido van Rossum, may be one of the most used programming languages today. It’s free, it’s relatively easy to learn, but there is trouble in paradise, Guido van Rossum is relinquishing
control over his creation and interestingly he didn’t appoint a successor...

Why would you care about this though? Python is currently the lingua franca in deep learning and data analytics in general. That is one of the reasons why it is becoming the go-to programming language for investment banks and
hedge funds to do pricing and risk management. It’s power and simplicity have been bridging the divide between academic researchers and developers that are solving real world business problems. This means that smarter algorithms
and products are brought to market faster than ever before.

Another reason why Python is becoming so successful is its open source nature. Everybody can use it for free. This might sound like a minor detail to some but free access creates a sort of cascade. Free usage means greatly
reduced adoption barriers. Low adoption barriers imply that it becomes interesting for educationally minded researchers. That in turn means powerful off-the-shelf algorithms for companies to use. Those same companies then use and
improve these, and open source the improved versions to attract the best talents. This completes the circle underlying the cascade.

As implicit in the above, open source does not only mean that it is free to use, but also that everybody can in principle improve the language itself. But how does one keep such a project under control and keep it from
spiralling out into anarchy? Where companies have CEOs, countries have presidents/prime ministers and Python has Guido van Rossum.
As a witty creator he dubbed himself ‘Benevolent Dictator for Life’ or BDFL for short. Compared to a president or CEO however, Guido’s BDFL role is more hands-on but like the CEO and president he is responsible for long term
vision and vetoing bad ideas.
In practice, it means that he has the final say when it comes to Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) which are the Python’s way for adding new features to the language. Within the programming language landscape such a central
decisive role is not that common. JavaScript and PHP for instance are much more of a democracy where commissions and voting guide the proposal acceptance process. Python’s approach is quite unique.

It came as a surprise that Van Rossum didn’t appoint a successor. He didn’t seem to be worried about this as he believed he rarely gets asked about the day to day decisions and that his opinions weren’t that important, meaning
everything can continue the way it was. However, it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll play out without him. Will it play out in the cutthroat style of Game of Thrones, or will civil discourse prevail? While in Van Rossum’s mind
nothing much is changing, it may be that his presence at Python was the symbolic leadership the community needed.

Companies we Admire

This month in ‘Companies we Admire’ we have not one, but two companies we want to highlight. One of them a supplier of ours, Elastic, and the other one a client, Adyen.

Adyen is a Dutch global payment company established in 2006 and currently has offices in 15 countries. Their client base consists of more than 3500 customers, including Ebay, Spotify, and Uber. You might have heard that they
successfully went public recently by listing shares publicly in Amsterdam. Before they went public on the 13th of June this year, their value was estimated to be 7 billion euros, but it quickly rose to more than 13 billion euros
within a day. Today, their stock market value is almost 17 billion euros. Talk about an exponential growth.

Another Dutch company that’s now also preparing to go public is Elastic. Their track record is just as impressive as Adyen’s. After their establishment in 2012, they now have offices in three continents, and their value is
estimated to be between 1,5 and 3 billion dollars (that’s between 1,3 and 4,3 billion euros). The company specializes in software that makes it possible to search in large data sets and consequently analyze that data. This is
what we use to find relevant articles for entities by using filters to match words about an entity against all the words in all the articles we have. Elastic has been rated as the most popular enterprise search engine by
DB-Engines ranking, with clients including Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, and even NASA, among hundred of thousands of others. Elastic’s IPO will take place around the beginning of fall, and is led by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan
Chase.

Owlin is growing

Sebastiaan Keller and Berjan Waanders will join the commercial team starting in August. Also, Chileshe Lukwesa will join Owlin in the Backend team. We look forward to welcome them on board!

Upcoming Events

August 10: Owlin will be hosting the Holland Fintech Meetup, you can find more details here.

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Global servers for global clients

Global servers for our global clients

"We moved most of our processes to the cloud – now running from 3 locations around the globe"

Different computers for different processes

Big data, Blockchains and Artificial intelligence. These are buzzwords that probably sound familiar by now.
They are most famous for the industry revolutionizing impact of their applications.
Think cryptocurrencies in the financial world and self-driving cars in the automotive industry.

Behind the scenes however, they are also transforming the industry that is making all this possible. Since some of these “hypes” are both very computationally intensive and profitable at the same time they are creating a boom in
specialized computing. Just a couple of years ago, standard processors from Intel (CPU) were the go-to choice for almost any form of computation.

This is changing fast, every form of computing is now getting its own specialized computer. Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable on normal CPUs but done on specialized computers called ASICs. High-end video cards (using GPUs)
are becoming a rarity for gamers since NVIDIA is now mainly making money with “supercomputers in a box” -- also for AI. A Little over a week ago NVIDIA launched a new powerhouse that makes the training of machine translation
datasets up to 10x faster than last years model! This is exactly the type of application and progress that is vital for Owlin’s business.

In the past you had to be able to buy the newest and best machine, now you just have to be able to afford an x amount of hours on that machine. So this week you might require some of Google's TPUs, next week your next project is
on GPUs and meanwhile you are “printing money” using ASICs. Even more forward-looking and more exciting are Neuromorphic and Quantum computing. In other words, computing is going to get even more fascinating than ever and we will
remain on top of the latest developments.

At our HQ, we also use different ‘super’ computers for different processes. Besides our processes in the cloud, we also have our specialized hardware for training new algorithms and models. For example, our machine translation
datasets run on their own very fast custom water-cooled computer, similar to the NVIDIA machine.

Only two years ago, Owlin was running almost all of its processes on its own hardware, on dedicated servers based in a secured location outside Amsterdam. As the number of servers grew (near a hundred in total) and our client
base was getting more global, this became more difficult to maintain. To make our operations more scalable and maintainable, we moved most of our processes to the cloud – now running from 3 locations around the globe.

A global client base deserves global thinking

A part of our commercial team was recently in New York to meet up with some of our U.S. based clients. In New York, they noticed that our applications load some seconds slower in the U.S. than within the EU. This of course had
to be changed – and we did exactly that.

Our developers have expanded our frontend clusters with instances in the North America and Singapore. This means that the dataset powering your Dashboard or API access will be cached (pre-loaded) locally in all three regions,
causing you to have faster access to the platform irrespective of your location. As a result, typically latencies when accessing Owlin in these regions are improved by multiple seconds. With the recent signing of our first South
American client, further roll out of front end clusters around the globe is to be expected soon.

From Russia with love

The technology industry is working hard to achieve and maintain gender balance. Here at Owlin we have a great bunch of people, of which approximately 40% are women. Alina was one of the first women to join Owlin full-time. Not
really knowing what to expect, she instantly liked the mix of “start-up coolness” with smart and professional people she could rely on.

"I think what I do is really cool."

It took her a long way to come here, literally speaking. Born in at that time still the USSR, with a detour to the Czech Republic, and some time in Germany, she finally landed in Amsterdam.

"When Owlin asked me if I would be interested in a project management position, I said yes immediately."

She wasn’t bothered by the fact that for some time, she was the only woman at the office. In fact, she always enjoyed working with her colleagues at Owlin because “they’re very direct and give feedback,” instantly adding that
she can also can get away with many things around here.

As for the changes Owlin-women brought along, she said that Owlin became more relaxed and that as a team they became more open to out of the box ideas.

“The women here are always rooting for each other as well.”

There’s no doubt they’ll be rooting for her once she achieves her dream of working at an Owlin office in Singapore one day. Her future in the company will definitely be “very fun, interesting, and unpredictable.”

Companies we admire

This time in ‘Companies we Admire’ we would like to feature Unity Technologies. Not only are they doing great business-wise, they are also doing great when it comes to the treatment of their staff. What it boils down to is their
dedication Servant Leadership and employee responsibility & accountability. Management enables their employees to do what they’re best at, and employees are directly responsible & accountable for their work. This ensures there
are no barriers for further growth.

You might have heard of Unity Technologies, as they are one of the biggest video game development companies with a valuation of more than 2.6 billion in May 2017. Starting with three people back in 2004, they now have over 1.500
employees in 24 countries. This global spread brings along the expected managerial challenges as well.
Their approach to tackle this is to bring out the best in their employees and for everyone at Unity to “stay happy.” To stay happy, they don’t just provide some of the standard perks you might expect, but they really try to add
value to the lives of their employees. They organize annual developer hackweeks in exotic locations among many other events, offer leadership training for all, and provide great food and Friday drinks. At Unity they are also very
open to employees deciding what to work on in order to develop skills and further develop the products. All of this makes sure employees stay happy – after all, a smiling employee is a motivated one.

At Owlin we have a similar philosophy. Everyone is encouraged to develop their talents. Through facilitating self-steering talented individuals who feel responsible and engaged, rather than task-based workers directed by single
top-down management, we aim to bring out the best in everyone at Owlin.

Upcoming Events

August 10: Owlin will be hosting the Holland Fintech Meetup, more details to be announced soon: here

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Global servers for our global clients

"We moved most of our processes to the cloud – now running from 3 locations around the globe"

Different computers for different processes

Big data, Blockchains and Artificial intelligence. These are buzzwords that probably sound familiar by now.
They are most famous for the industry revolutionizing impact of their applications.
Think cryptocurrencies in the financial world and self-driving cars in the automotive industry.

Behind the scenes however, they are also transforming the industry that is making all this possible. Since some of these “hypes” are both very computationally intensive and profitable at the same time they are creating a boom in
specialized computing. Just a couple of years ago, standard processors from Intel (CPU) were the go-to choice for almost any form of computation.

This is changing fast, every form of computing is now getting its own specialized computer. Bitcoin mining is no longer profitable on normal CPUs but done on specialized computers called ASICs. High-end video cards (using GPUs)
are becoming a rarity for gamers since NVIDIA is now mainly making money with “supercomputers in a box” -- also for AI. A Little over a week ago NVIDIA launched a new powerhouse that makes the training of machine translation
datasets up to 10x faster than last years model! This is exactly the type of application and progress that is vital for Owlin’s business.

In the past you had to be able to buy the newest and best machine, now you just have to be able to afford an x amount of hours on that machine. So this week you might require some of Google's TPUs, next week your next project is
on GPUs and meanwhile you are “printing money” using ASICs. Even more forward-looking and more exciting are Neuromorphic and Quantum computing. In other words, computing is going to get even more fascinating than ever and we will
remain on top of the latest developments.

At our HQ, we also use different ‘super’ computers for different processes. Besides our processes in the cloud, we also have our specialized hardware for training new algorithms and models. For example, our machine translation
datasets run on their own very fast custom water-cooled computer, similar to the NVIDIA machine.

Only two years ago, Owlin was running almost all of its processes on its own hardware, on dedicated servers based in a secured location outside Amsterdam. As the number of servers grew (near a hundred in total) and our client
base was getting more global, this became more difficult to maintain. To make our operations more scalable and maintainable, we moved most of our processes to the cloud – now running from 3 locations around the globe.

A global client base deserves global thinking

A part of our commercial team was recently in New York to meet up with some of our U.S. based clients. In New York, they noticed that our applications load some seconds slower in the U.S. than within the EU. This of course had
to be changed – and we did exactly that.

Our developers have expanded our frontend clusters with instances in the North America and Singapore. This means that the dataset powering your Dashboard or API access will be cached (pre-loaded) locally in all three regions,
causing you to have faster access to the platform irrespective of your location. As a result, typically latencies when accessing Owlin in these regions are improved by multiple seconds. With the recent signing of our first South
American client, further roll out of front end clusters around the globe is to be expected soon.

From Russia with love

The technology industry is working hard to achieve and maintain gender balance. Here at Owlin we have a great bunch of people, of which approximately 40% are women. Alina was one of the first women to join Owlin full-time. Not
really knowing what to expect, she instantly liked the mix of “start-up coolness” with smart and professional people she could rely on.

"I think what I do is really cool."

It took her a long way to come here, literally speaking. Born in at that time still the USSR, with a detour to the Czech Republic, and some time in Germany, she finally landed in Amsterdam.

"When Owlin asked me if I would be interested in a project management position, I said yes immediately."

She wasn’t bothered by the fact that for some time, she was the only woman at the office. In fact, she always enjoyed working with her colleagues at Owlin because “they’re very direct and give feedback,” instantly adding that
she can also can get away with many things around here.

As for the changes Owlin-women brought along, she said that Owlin became more relaxed and that as a team they became more open to out of the box ideas.

“The women here are always rooting for each other as well.”

There’s no doubt they’ll be rooting for her once she achieves her dream of working at an Owlin office in Singapore one day. Her future in the company will definitely be “very fun, interesting, and unpredictable.”

Companies we admire

This time in ‘Companies we Admire’ we would like to feature Unity Technologies. Not only are they doing great business-wise, they are also doing great when it comes to the treatment of their staff. What it boils down to is their
dedication Servant Leadership and employee responsibility & accountability. Management enables their employees to do what they’re best at, and employees are directly responsible & accountable for their work. This ensures there
are no barriers for further growth.

You might have heard of Unity Technologies, as they are one of the biggest video game development companies with a valuation of more than 2.6 billion in May 2017. Starting with three people back in 2004, they now have over 1.500
employees in 24 countries. This global spread brings along the expected managerial challenges as well.
Their approach to tackle this is to bring out the best in their employees and for everyone at Unity to “stay happy.” To stay happy, they don’t just provide some of the standard perks you might expect, but they really try to add
value to the lives of their employees. They organize annual developer hackweeks in exotic locations among many other events, offer leadership training for all, and provide great food and Friday drinks. At Unity they are also very
open to employees deciding what to work on in order to develop skills and further develop the products. All of this makes sure employees stay happy – after all, a smiling employee is a motivated one.

At Owlin we have a similar philosophy. Everyone is encouraged to develop their talents. Through facilitating self-steering talented individuals who feel responsible and engaged, rather than task-based workers directed by single
top-down management, we aim to bring out the best in everyone at Owlin.

Upcoming Events

August 10: Owlin will be hosting the Holland Fintech Meetup, more details to be announced soon: here

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Owlin is in the palm of your hands

Owlin is going mobile! We’re excited to announce our new mobile app.

Read all about it as well as an interview with its developers in this month’s newsletter.

Owlin is in the palm of your hands

We’re very excited to announce our first mobile app! Now you can get insights into your dashboard wherever you are.
We’re proud to say that we have worked intensively with our clients to deliver the best product, and thanks go to everyone who contributed.
To read more about the process, read the interview below.

Going Mobile

The implementation of the new mobile app was a team effort but there were two key players within Owlin, Marcia and Wessel. From researching the client’s needs to actually designing and building the app, it was all done by their
hands. Although they didn’t have prior experience with it, the team was confident in their abilities to build it. The team already showed before that they can tackle any heavy tech challenge.

A prevalent theme throughout this project was the engagement with the clients. Marcia mentioned that the app “was a client need.” They therefore involved the end users in the process, which involved different stages, with
usability being the longest stage of the journey.

"We wanted to interview our clients to see what they expect from a mobile app. It was good to involve them in the process because they feel they are part of it." - Wessel

He added: “I learned that if we invest more time in the beginning of the process - usability and prototyping, we can build easier and quicker, because we know what the users want, and basically what to include in the final
product.”

They both agree that the user customization is the coolest feature of the app. Marcia said of this:

“That’s one of the things that distinguishes Owlin from other competitors in the market. We are very custom tailored.”

Companies we admire

Instead of a company we admire, we have a person we admire this month! Making semiconductors, or integrated circuits is a complicated process requiring a lot of capital, expensive machines, and a clean room environment. Most
engineers would not even consider making a chip in their garage. Luckily there are always people with enough curiosity and determination to try things most people would consider impossible.

One of those people is Sam Zeloof, a high school senior who wanted to learn how one would make a chip at home. He spent 1.5 years in his parent's garage figuring out the extremely complicated processes needed to strip
away layers of silicon oxide, deposit metal in the right places and all the other things needed to make a working chip. All of this he did by reading advanced textbooks and asking advice from people in the industry. On the way,
he learned a lot about chemistry, physics and process engineering.

In the end he managed to make a working differential amplifier chip technologically similar to high end 1970's technology but instead of a facility costing millions of dollars and many people he did it alone on a budget in his
parents' garage. Truly a reminder that almost anything is possible if you have the determination to learn and experiment.

Interesting Scoop

This time in interesting scoop, we have a challenge for you! Or more accurate, Google, MIT, Oxford and others have a challenge for you. Like Owlin, these companies are interested in bringing AI to the Financial sector. A major
roadblock for doing that however, is that most AI algorithms are a black box. While they might give good results, they cannot explain how they obtained them. This especially problematic in an industry that is under strict
supervision from regulators.

To fix this status quo, the aforementioned companies and universities have partnered with FICO, a financial data supplier, to organize a challenge around the topic of explainable AI. Teams will be provided an actual financial
dataset and will be challenged to create machine learning models with both high accuracy and explainability. Are you up for the challenge?

At Owlin we share this vision to make AI explainable for the simple reason that it allows for audit and adaptability. If you want to read more about the challenge, or if you want to participate in it, click here.

Owlin Rooftop Drinks & Bites

Owlin is hosting a Rooftop Drinks & Bites in the midst of Money 20/20 on the 5th of June from 17:30 until 21:30. It’s the perfect opportunity to unwind and network with a stellar view over Amsterdam. If you want to join this
event, request an invitation here.

Upcoming Events

June 4-6: Money 20/20 Europe: come visit our stand J47!

June 5: Owlin Rooftop Drinks & Bites

June 11-15: Owlin will be in NYC

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Paving the Way

Paving the Way

Get a look behind the scenes at Owlin this month.

We’ve been working hard to optimize our products and are excited to share the new developments.

KPMG IATI

After the Startup Trends Index and the Technology Trends Index, we’ve partnered with KPMG again and present you the Intelligent Automation Trends Index. This is the first time that an ‘AI robot’ is analyzing the world of AI. The
only question is: does the IATI realize it’s analyzing itself?

Artificial Intelligence is Taking Over

After recently adding support for Chinese, we are glad to announce that Italian news will soon pop up on your dashboards as well! If you keep on reading you will get to know some of technology that makes this all possible.

Until very recently, the state of art was so-called “Statistical Machine Translation”. Right now Artificial Intelligence is taking over in this space. We are not taking this as literally as the doomsday rhetoric of Elon Musk
however, we just like the better translations it gives us.

The method we use at Owlin is called “Neural Machine Translation”. This new technology is based on “Neural Networks”. Like the “Statistical Machine Translation” methods, Neural Networks deeply rely on statistical methods too.
The statistics just became a lot more complex to the point that humans don’t even understand why they work so well!

This complexity also means that it takes a lot of computing power to train our systems to ‘understand’ a language. Luckily it turns out that the chips needed for video games (GPU’s) are also exceedingly good at doing Neural
Network calculations. At Owlin we have our own specialized machine with multiple high end video cards that need liquid cooling to prevent it from catching fire! So anytime we add a language not only a lot of human effort went
into it but also many, many hours of non-stop computation.

Paving the Way

Willem joined Owlin in its early days, initially to improve his programming skills, but that led to “putting down my laptop and never leaving.” He was in for more than he could imagine. Next to his work as a Data Scientist,
which led him to become a better programmer, he sometimes dives into other fields as well. This includes talking to clients, designing new products and improve overall processes to increase data quality.

“I have a flexible skill-set. I can program, write, and I can do commerce. On every aspect where you need a specialist, but don’t have one yet, I’ll do that. I pave the way for a lot of people.”

Being a small company, it’s useful to be handy in multiple things. “Right now I’m taking on a more and more supervisory role, focussing on R&D.”

All this goes to show that Willem doesn’t shy away from challenges.

He’s challenging himself in his personal life as well. “I always say I have a week job at Owlin and a weekend job as a researcher.” Having a background in physics, he knew he wanted to study it since the age of 12.

I used to read a lot of books at the library and stumbled upon one from Einstein one day. That’s when I knew I wanted to study physics.

His research is a continuation of his academic career where he started to tie quantum mechanics to Einstein’s theory of gravity *. A few years ago he took some steps back to understand the fundamentals of quantum
mechanics better

“I was busy tying quantum mechanics to the theory of relativity, but behind that are so many questions I didn’t have the answers to yet. So I wanted those answers first.”

The weekends he spends solving mathematical equations. He can’t say for sure where in the building up process he is, but is hopeful that it’ll be finished, at least in his lifetime. “I’ve rarely had the feeling that I’m
this close to solving it though.”

* Quantum mechanics are the fundamentals of physics. It can for example explain why things have a certain color, and light and radioactivity. However, it cannot explain gravity.

Companies We Admire

You may be wondering why Netflix is one of the companies we admire. Besides the obvious reasons, for us, it’s mostly about their development philosophy and how it relates to their commercial goals.

For example, when was the last time you remember Netflix was down? This is not without reason. Netflix makes use of Chaos Monkey, where they purposely and continuously shut down a random server at random times. Essentially
turning an exceptional situation into a common one. Now, in theory when a server would break down, thousands of people would be interrupted in the middle of their show. However, because Netflix makes use of Chaos Monkey,
the developers are forced to structure the architecture in such a way that playback will not be interrupted ever, even in those exceptional cases.

This philosophy ensures only robust systems, that are capable of automatically recovering from issues, end up in production. As a result, you get to enjoy Netflix without interruptions.

Interesting Scoop

Jupyter is an online application where you can experiment with different programming languages, focusing mostly on Python. Since this month, they support Go as well. Go is considered a more difficult language to use by
some because of its compiling, but at the same time it’s a no nonsense programming language, and very good at concurrency (doing multiple things at the same time). At Owlin, we make use of Go in the backend as well, and
because of this update are now able to experiment with it on Jupyter. Fun fact, Go was created at Google and is often referred to as Golang to make it more easily findable in search engines. Isn't it ironic that a Google
created a programming language that is not findable on Google. f you want to read more, or if you want to try it yourself, click here.

We Were Here

April seemed to be a month full of events. Here a sneak peek of all the events we attended.

- Owlin hosted a panel at the Nationale Carrièrebeurs

- We joined the Women in Fintech event at the DNB

- A delegation of Owlin attended the Adyen Tech 5: organized by TNW

- Wouter Sterk and Bob Koster were at the Salesforce World Tour

- Our own Bob Koster spoke at the PON event

Upcoming Events

May 4: Plastic Fishing event with Adyen in Amsterdam

May 17: PensionTech Summit (The Hague)

June 4-6: Money 20/20 Europe (Amsterdam)

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Get to know Owlin

Is there any better way to get to know us than through data?

Numbers are certainly our strong suit. Given our size, we sure are a diverse bunch.

We speak Chinese

你好吗? For your global portfolio of counter parties or peers, it is of crucial importance to know what’s going on in the no. 2 economy in the world. We’re happy to inform you that since this month, our platform also supports (both
traditional and simplified) Chinese. Thanks to our trained machine learning algorithms, news from thousands of Chinese sources are scanned, clustered and translated in near real-time. This enables you to track all relevant events
within Chinese-spoken sources and get intelligence on opportunities, risks and trends. We’ll be adding more Chinese sources on a continuous basis — And we’ll keep continuing to add new languages as well in the future.

How do our translation algorithms work? Owlin makes use of neural machine translation. It enables our platform to learn — and solidly improve — its language skills based on artificial intelligence. You will start to see more
articles and improved results in the future. To get a grasp on how AI and machine learning works, check out this short (and fun) explanatory video.

Five years on

An interview with Sjoerd Leemhuis, CEO

In 2012, Owlin started as subtenant in the building of the regional TV and radio station of Utrecht. Today, the company sits in a penthouse next to the former Heineken brewery in Amsterdam with a commanding view of the city
centre.

Of the 26 desks, 22 are now of the electric sort – the ones you can move up and down. “€500 ex BTW,” says Sjoerd, with a smile. “And the best chairs. €350 a piece. And hi-res screens, €200 each. I think we spend about €1,200 per
workstation. We thought we’d better do it right.”

“In the beginning, Bart (van Halder) was responsible for three or four severs, the coffee machine and the printer. Last year, we had about 100 servers running at the same time, and Bart was looking after them all. He
spent too much time worrying. We changed to Google Cloud. It costs twice as much, but now at least Bart can get some sleep and we have more redundancy.”

Owlin also has numerous front-end servers running now, so updates can be executed daily and on-the-go.

In the past five years, at least five babies were born to Owlin employees – two are Sjoerd’s. No intracompany marriages yet and we’ll stay silent about romances.

In Utrecht, lunch was eaten at the canteen. After the move to Amsterdam Francesco Puglierin joined. He is from Veneto, so he cares about food and took it upon himself to educate these barbarians north of the Rhine. This kept
everybody happy, but last year Sjoerd hired a catering company to serve a hot lunch every day. “So the data scientist (Francesco) has more time to be a data scientist.”

Owlin now has 25 employees, from 10 countries, serving dozens of clients and thousands of users.

“Five years ago, my worry was – if this deal doesn’t go through, will we still exist next week? Now, I worry: we have this entire payroll, do we have enough work next month to pay all these people?”

“But in a funny way, I am more prepared for this stage of the growth than for the startup period,” says Sjoerd. “I was trained at larger companies, so the challenges are more familiar.”

Companies we admire

OpenAI:

You might have heard of the first AI chess bot winning from the chess world champion back in 1996. While very impressive at that time, AI has made huge leaps since then. Only last August, a Dota 2 bot, a competitive game of action
and strategy enjoyed by millions of fans worldwide, won from the most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles. The reason this is remarkable is not only because Dota 2 is vastly more complex than chess, but also
because the bot was developed in just six months by OpenAI, with only two weeks of real-time training.

Not only do we think OpenAI is cool because they created a Dota 2 bot, but because this game shows how much you can do with AI. OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial
general intelligence, which is simply said a software that is smarter and faster than humans. In October 2015, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors announced the formation of the organization, pledging over US$1 billion to
the venture. While it may seem that AI is now being used for insignificant applications like games, with the pace it’s going, it can be used for much bigger challenges in the future.

Are you not subscribed to our newsletter yet? click here
to subscribe.

Close

Owlin team continues to expand

Owlin team continues to expand

In preparation of expanding to the US Owlin is hiring!

Recently Wouter (29) and Merel (24) joined the team

Wouter Sterk came on board on the team as Commercial Manager and one of his main focuses will be the customer success and consequently Owlin’s success.

Wouter was born in Delft to a family with Indonesian roots, and grew up in a small village in the south of Utrecht. He studied Economics & Geography and started is working career at ABN AMRO as Industry Analyst for the Tech, Media & Telecom desks and subsequently in an advising role on strategic topics for the CEO and Executive Board.

"My ambition was to work at an innovative and fast-growing fintech company before turning 30 -- which is just in time, as tomorrow is my birthday."

Wouter holds a genuine passion for traveling and he is interested in politics.

Merel Steenbrink joined Owlin’s team as Software Engineer. She grew up in Maastricht and moved to Amsterdam to study Beta-Gamma, an interdisciplinary studies that combined the social sciences with the exact science. During these studies she got charmed with the beauty of logic and decided to study Mathematics next to it. She ended up discovering that she enjoyed programming and decided to do a coding boot camp.

"With mathematics I could never really show what I did, but now I could finally demonstrate my mom what I’d made, and she could be sincerely proud."

After the boot camp Merel was ready to experience the next step and that’s when she decided to join Owlin.

"I’m looking forward to be surrounded by so many young, driven people where the vibe is “we can make everything, and if we don’t know how to do it, we can learn it and just try”. This mentality inspires me a lot and I can’t wait to learn new things."

Close

Brexit news breakdown

Brexit news breakdown

As an alternative to reading ad hoc articles, the Brexit Monitor provides you with a bigger picture through quantitative information which you can act upon.

No-one seems yet able to oversee the effects of the Brexit in the markets. Will it increase risk or will it provide opportunities? It is easy to get lost or get a biased view of all the information that is produced around this
topic every day. To provide a broader perspective and help you make better decisions, Owlin has created the Brexit Monitor.

FD profiles co-founder Bas van Ooyen

Breaking the news - ING Labs

Breaking the news - ING Labs

“Partnering with an external company like Owlin gives us an opportunity to leapfrog developing such a tool ourselves”, says ING Wholesale Banking Head of Business Development Advanced Analytics Doron Reuter.

What Owlin´s system does is translate ING's risk expertise into effective news insights. This means that ING can quickly spot whether negative news is emerging about a particular bank.

Who Will Be Next To Invest In The Internet Of Things? KPMG Startup Trends Index Can Help Provide Answers

Venture capitalists are placing big bets on digital payments and the Internet of Things, but are still scoping out plays for "gamification" and biometrics. The Consumer Goods and Media & Entertainment sectors are ripe for startups
and investment activity and dominating media attention in these areas, according to the new KPMG Startup Trends Index.

Alina Di appointed project manager

Alina Di appointed project manager

A graduate of Prague and Mainz universities

This week Alina Di (28) came on board of the team as a project manager for Owlin.

She was born in Luchegorsk in far Eastern Russia (Look it up!),
between China and Japan. 'Walking distance to China,' she says. She grew up in Vladivostok, 477 km to the south.

After high school, she went to Prague to study International Relations and European Studies. After her bachelor's, she specialized in International Business at the University of Economics there. In 2010, she decided to go for a
double master by entering the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany as well. She received her MA degrees in 2011. She worked in Frankfurt, Darmstadt and Prague before coming to Amsterdam, at the end of 2014.

Alina loves to read - favourite novel: 'War and Peace' by Tolstoy - and boating. She and her partner bought a small boat in Amsterdam and she loves touring the canals, 'especially in the evenings.' She also likes to play chess but
she doesn't want that mentioned because it sounds too dull.

Owlin expands development team

Owlin hires three programmers in a difficult job market.

Two data scientists and a full-stack developer join in Q2

Francesco Puglierin (31) is from Asolo in the Veneto, in the north of Italy, 'Just north of Venice. Well, Treviso actually,' he explains. He studied Computer Science at the University of Padua and he first landed in The
Netherlands through the Erasmus programme. After a brief interval working for Citi in Barcelona, he came back to study in Utrecht where he graduated with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at the end of 2012. His first
'real' job was with a Kickstarter project that took him to Shenzhen, China. After working on a number of other projects as a freelancer, he spent the last six months refining his Data Science skills and entered the job market
again. He chose Owlin over an offer from a company with 8.000 employees and 150 offices worldwide.

"I like small companies. It's more challenging, but there is so much stuff to learn! The environment is very dynamic, and you feel your contribution can really make the difference"

At Owlin, Francesco will work on improving Owlin's natural language processing capabilities.

Carmine Paolino (who will turn 28 this summer) works one day a week at Owlin while he finishes his Master’s thesis in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam with specialization in Technical Artificial
Intelligence.

The thesis is titled ‘Music Genre Recognition with Deep Neural Networks.’ Carmine’s aim is to develop an algorithm that recognizes genres of music from the audio signal and continually improves that ability through AI. He hopes to
complete his Master’s in August and join Owlin full-time after that. At Owlin, he is currently responsible for improving the clustering algorithm.

He came to Amsterdam after completing his B.Sc at Bologna, a university recommended by friends from back home (Castrovillari, Calabria) for the quality of its computer science department. In high school in Castrovillari, he was a
Gentoo Linux programmer as well as an ambitious chess player and an accomplished karate master. He now spends a lot of his spare time composing electronic music and playing as a DJ at various clubs in Amsterdam.

Carmine started using computers at the age of 3, and 'since then I fell in love with them,' he says.

Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen (33) will be 'full-stack' developer at Owlin, meaning he will develop front end, back end and everything in between on Owlin's products. Initially, he will focus on improving the API. How did he end up at
Owlin?

'Well, I met Bas (van Ooyen) in the bar, actually,' he says with a grin. In the Cafe Belgie on the Oude Gracht in Utrecht, to be precise. Autumn 2014. They discovered their shared passion for programming and Bas invited
him to work on a new product - the user interface for a new product for one of Owlin's clients in the financial sector.

Ralf grew up and went to high school in Alphen aan den Rijn and studied Computer Science at Utrecht University. He found that he was more interested in developing for himself than executing school assignments. He has been working
on projects ever since and still spends part of his time working for clients other than Owlin.

Els Beernink joins as account manager

Els Beernink joins Owlin as account manage,

ensuring quality support for a rapidly growing client list.

Her job will be to keep Owlin clients happy and to act as a bridge between clients and Owlin developers.

“We have signed quite a few new clients over the past six months and looking at our pipeline, we expect to welcome more in the months ahead. We have to make sure these clients not only sign a contract but also experience
a long and happy relationship with Owlin,” says co-founder Sjoerd Leemhuis.

Els joins Owlin from Reed Elsevier, the science publishers, where she worked as editor and later as account manager. She has a Bachelor’s in Biology from the University of Amsterdam and Master’s degree in Environmental Studies
from Utrecht University.

As part of her Master’s she did an internship at Arcadis. In 2009 and 2013/14 she participated as a volunteer in development projects in Ghana and Indonesia. In her spare time – which will be very spare from Feb 1 onward - she
enjoys playing the piano, singing, gardening and outdoor sports.

"Owlin is a fast growing business in a dynamic environment with smart and motivated people. I am looking forward to be a part of that," says Els.

Owlin, founded in 2012, now has 30+ clients in banking, insurance, accounting, and other businesses where timely information is valuable.

Owlin gathers news from almost one million public sources worldwide, and through proprietary algorithms, software and interfaces turns ‘Information into Actionable Intelligence.’

How to make money with Owlin

How to make money with Owlin

Three recent cases from the real world

On July 30, ASML jumped 11% in half a trading day. Dutch investment blogs were initially puzzled. Owlin readers knew, though: Owlin carried the market-moving news from an American trade letter 1h26m before Dutch news sources
picked it up (at which point the stock had already climbed 7,5%). In two other instances in the same week of July 2014, Owlin did not give traders an actual time advantage during trading hours but something almost as valuable: time
to reflect and analyse the news.

02:00: independent news source LAW360 publishes the reason: Corio is about to be taken over by Klepierre, a French rival

09:00: most media report on the news, just before or after trading opens. Klepierre’s all-share offer is €41,44 per Corio share, a 15,4% premium on the previous day’s closing.

Owlin reported all news moments in real time or minutes later. In this case, Owlin subscribers had no trading advantage because the takeover announcement came outside market hours. But Owlin did give subscribers the reason
behind the announcement to suspend trading; and ample time (seven hours) to consider their trading strategy in Corio before the opening bell.

07:45: Owlin references www.adidas-group.com with the latest revised financial outlook and announced strategic measures of Adidas Group

09:00: German financial news sources are quick to report the news of the revised profit expectations. Adidas shares open more than 15% lower than the close of previous day

Owlin shows that access to ‘raw’ information from the source gives a valuable trading advantage. Owlin’s news search not only includes news services but also primary sources of news such as corporate websites, government
announcements, blogs, and forums.